The Dark Defiles (4 page)

“The two in the stable?” Archeth asked with dangerous calm.

Egar nodded. “Yeah, couple of Shendanak’s guys came out in the street while I was stomping him. That was before Tand showed up. I had to take them down as well. No big deal.”

“No big deal, I see. Doctor?”

“Superficial injuries,” Barla confirmed. “I’ve given both men a grain of flandrijn to keep them happy. They should sleep it off and be fine by the morning.”

“I see. Egar—let’s get this straight. Exactly how many men have you … damaged today?”

“Just the three. The others backed right off.” The Dragonbane paused. “Well, and there was the one in the tavern earlier, the other tavern, where I’m billeted. I bottled him because he was groping my whore, wouldn’t give it up.”

Archeth shook her head. “I’m sorry? You bottled him because
what
?”

“Yeah, it’s how I knew this shit was going down in the first place. The way they came in, throwing their weight around. Two he was with probably would have let it go, but—”

“Wait,
wait.
” She held up her hands, palm out. “Stop. Eg, suppose you act like I don’t know what the fuck is going on for a moment, and
tell
me what the fuck is going on. From the start. What happened? How did we end up like this?”

H
OW DID WE END UP LIKE THIS?

It would have been a reasonable question for anyone on the expedition to ask.

Five months back, it was all bright spring sunlight and cheering, as the freshly minted flotilla sailed downriver through Yhelteth and out to sea. Fair winds and a high quest, the Emperor’s blessing and the city turned out in force to see them off. Jhiral, in a shrewdly calculated crowd-pleasing gesture, had made the day of their departure a public holiday, and the banks of the river were thronged on both sides. Every ship in the harbor flew sky-blue and silver pennants for luck. Even the Citadel—or at least the more collaboration-minded among its mastery—had been prevailed upon to offer up prayers for the expedition’s success and safe homecoming. Incense billowed from blessing braziers along the river, smoked out over the water, mingled with the crisscrossed traceries of a thousand fireworks set off.

Pretty noisy for a secret mission,
Ringil reckoned as they left the estuary, shadowed on all sides by a mob of smaller craft filled with waving, bellowing well-wishers. But you could see even he was enjoying himself.

That’s “voyage of scientific discovery” to you, son,
Mahmal Shanta told him, grinning.

And the wind stropped at the unfurled canvas overhead, the sun glistened on the foaming churn of their bow-wave, and Archeth, who was already starting to miss Ishgrim, found a quiet smile despite herself.

Now two out of three vessels sat storm-battered and damp, huddled into Ornley harbor like whipped dogs in a kitchen corner.
Dragon’s Demise
was off up the coast, chasing another pointless lead, and it seemed the rain would never stop.

And for lack of other enemies, we’re tearing each other apart.

She heard Egar out with weary patience—the brawl over whores, Tand and Shendanak’s bet, the fight with Shendanak in the street, the stand-off with his angry cousins over his beaten body, the arrival of Tand and his men … 

“Didn’t really need them,” sniffed the Dragonbane. “But it got things wrapped up a lot faster, you know.”

No surprise there—Tand’s mercenaries were a cold-eyed, scary bunch, a couple of hundred years’ brutal enforcement experience between them and all the scars to show for it. You’d have to be either pretty sure of yourself or pretty far gone to get into it with them. Shendanak’s cousins were tough enough in their unseasoned steppe-grown fashion, they were mostly younger men, and there were more of them. But in the end, methodical battle-trained competence was always going to tell. It was the axiomatic truth they’d all learned in the war.

“Where is Tand?” she asked.

Egar shrugged. “He got them to call Rakan, then he fucked off. Went back to his rooms, I reckon. You know how much he hates the rain.”

“Right. I’m going to talk to him.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. You won’t.” Archeth jerked a thumb in the direction of the door and the men gathered on the stairs beyond it. “You say you can handle Shendanak’s crew? Then you stay here with Rakan in case we need you to do exactly that. You let me worry about Tand.”

I
T WAS BRAVADO SHE DIDN’T MUCH FEEL.
T
HE KRIN HAD PEAKED ON HER
back aboard
Sea Eagle’s Daughter,
and now it was starting to wane. All she really felt was tired. But she lacquered on a thin shell of pretense as she went up through the streets to Tand’s inn, forced the ghost of strength down into her legs with each step, and reminded herself that she was the Emperor’s Named Envoy for the expedition, the Authority of the Burnished Throne made Flesh.

And an immortal black-skinned witch with dark magic from the veins of the Earth at her command.

Let’s not forget that one, Archidi.

She found Menith Tand sat at a table in one corner of the otherwise empty tavern bar, flanked by two of his mercenary crew and playing out a deck of cards in some version of solitaire she didn’t know. If he was concerned about the path of recent events, it didn’t show. Lamps had been lit for him against the late afternoon gloom, and in the light they cast, his narrow features were composed to the point of boredom. She saw he’d recently had a shave, and his ostentatiously undyed gray hair was gathered back on either side of his head with twinned clips the color of ivory—carved, so the rumor went, from the bones of an escaped slave. He met Archeth’s eye as she came through the tavern door and nodded, then leaned back in his chair to speak with one of his men. As she approached the table, the man stepped forward and for a moment her pulse ratcheted up. But the mercenary just made a clumsy bow and set out the chair opposite Tand for her to sit down.

“Greetings, my lady.” The slave magnate placed a new card, frowning at the pattern for a moment before he looked up. “Won’t you sit down?”

Archeth ignored the snub. She rested her hands on the back of the chair. “I hear you’ve taken some kind of bet with Klarn Shendanak.”

“Yes.” Tand went back to brooding on his cards. “What of it?”

“Are you entirely fucking stupid, Tand?”

The slaver turned over a card, did not look up. “Not entirely, my lady, no. Why, what seems to be the problem?”

“You really think going to war with the locals for a bet is a smart thing to do? You think we can afford that right now?” Quick, dark pulse of krinzanz rage.
“I’m talking to you, Tand! Did your krin-whore mother drop you on your fucking head when you were a baby?”

The mercenary who’d put out the chair stiffened, laid hand to sword-hilt. Archeth peeled him her best lethal-black-witch look and watched with satisfaction as the hand slid away again. Tand, meanwhile—

The slaver had paused, theatrically, midway through playing out a card. Momentary stillness, and it was hard to tell if she’d got to him or if it was for show, but—yes,
there.
A vein pulsed in one temple. Archeth cheered inwardly at the sight. Then Tand completed his play, laid aside the slim sheaf of cards in his hand, and sat back in his chair.

“My mother was a noblewoman of Baldaran stock, my lady.” The pale, cold eyes swiveled up to meet her own, and for just a moment she saw the fury chained there, she saw how dangerous he was. But the slave magnate’s voice, when it came, was cool and even. “And as for krinzanz, I think it’s likely she saw less of it in the course of her whole life than is currently coursing through your half-blood veins. So. Perhaps we can dispense with the cheap insults now and behave a little more as befits our station, yes?”

She leaned on the back of the chair. “I’m all in favor of that, Tand. Let’s start by knocking off the occupation tactics. You were there at Lanatray, you signed the accord like everybody else. We are diplomatic guests of the Trelayne League, permitted access to the Hironish isles on that basis. Let’s act as such.”

“They made us their guests because they didn’t have a choice. The peace is fragile, my lady. They’d hardly deny us passage and risk the Emperor’s displeasure.”

“I think you overestimate imperial influence. By the best route home, we’re nearly three thousand miles from Yhelteth.”

Tand made a dismissive gesture. “We’re the best part of a thousand miles from Trelayne as well. By the time word of what we do here reaches anyone who matters, we’ll be long gone. That’s if anyone cares in the first place, which—if my knowledge of Trelayne Chancellery affairs is anything to go by—they won’t.”

He probably had a point. Ringil had told her exactly how remote from League affairs the Hironish isles were. Some of the dignitaries they met with in Lanatray had even been a little vague on where exactly the islands were to be found, how far north or west they would have to sail to reach them. And Tand, in his capacity as major player in the slave markets, had spent enough time back and forth between League and Empire in the last few years to be accurately informed. Still—

“The peace is fragile on both sides, Tand. What you’re doing here could be just the tinder it needs. You throw your weight around like this under the auspices of an imperial expedition and you’re creating a perfect pretext for war.”

“Frankly, I doubt that. But in any case, what we’ve done so far is considerably more controlled and less destructive than what will probably happen if the men are left much longer without some outlet for their frustrations. You have dragged us to the ends of the Earth, my lady, and now we’re here, you give us nothing to do. That’s not an ideal situation for fighting men.”

“So you don’t believe there’s anything to learn from these interrogations? The whole thing’s a sham, just to keep the men exercised?”

The slave magnate nodded sagely. “No call to let Klarn Shendanak know that, of course, but—yes, more or less.”

“I doubt I’ll be telling Shendanak anything in the near future. The Dragonbane put him in a coma.”

“Did he now?” There might have been admiration in Tand’s voice.

“You didn’t know that? You were there, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I thought the old tub of guts looked rather mauled when we arrived. But you know what these Majak are like—up on the steppe, they’re beating the shit out of each other the minute they drop out of the womb. They breed for thick skulls.”

“Well, Shendanak not so much, it seems.”

“No.” Tand looked genuinely thoughtful for the first time since she’d walked in. “That does put a different complexion on things. We’d better—”

The door of the tavern banged back. Twitchy with the crashing krin, Archeth jumped at the noise it made.

“Sire!” It was one of Tand’s men, grinning triumphantly in the doorway. “Sire, we’ve got it!”

He advanced into the room, campaign cap off for respect, shaven head gleaming with sweat in the low light. He seemed to have been running, he was panting hard. Took a moment to get his breath under control.

“We’ve got it,” he said again.

“I’m sure you have, Nalmur,” said Tand patiently. “But perhaps you could tell the lady Archeth and myself
what
exactly it is that you’ve got?”

Nalmur glanced at Archeth, apparently noticing her for the first time in the gloom. His expression grew a little more wary, but his face was still suffused with delight.

“The thousand elementals, my lord. The bet. We know what happened to the Illwrack Changeling!”

e felt the change as soon as he stepped over the threshold of the croft. It came on like icy water, sprinkling across the nape of his neck.

He tilted his head a little to send the feeling away, traced a warding glyph in the air, like taking down a volume from a library shelf. Around him, the croft walls grew back to an enclosing height they likely hadn’t seen in decades. The boiling gray sky blacked out, replaced with damp-smelling thatch overhead. A dull, reddish glow reached out to him from the hearth. Peat smoke stung his throat. He heard the slow creak of wood.

A worn oak rocking chair, angled at the fireside, tilting gently back and forth. From where he stood, Ringil could not tell what was seated there, only that it was wrapped in a dark cloak and cowl.

The ward he’d chosen was burning down around him like some torched peasant’s hut. He felt the fresh exposure shiver through him. Reached for something stronger, cracked finger-bones etching it into the air.

“Yes—becoming quite adept at that, aren’t we?” It was a voice that creaked like the chair. Wheeze and rustle of seeming age, or maybe just the breathlessness at the end of laughing too hard at something. “Quite the master of the
ikinri ‘ska
these days.”

His fresh ward shattered apart, no better than the first—the chill of the Presence rushed in on him. The rocking chair jerked violently around, from no agency he could see. The thing it held was a corpse.

The shrunken mounds it made within the wrap of the cloak were unmistakable, the way it skewed awkwardly in the seat, as if blown there by the wind. The cowl was tipped forward like the muzzle of some huge dark worm, shrouding the face. One ivory-pallid hand gripped an armrest, flesh shrunk back from long, curving nails. The other hand was lost in the folds of the cloak, and seemed to be holding something.

His hand leaped up, across, closed on the hilt of the Ravensfriend where it jutted over his left shoulder.

“Oh, please,” creaked the voice. “Put that away, why don’t you. If I can break your wards like sticks for kindling, how hard do you think it’s going to be for me to break that dinky little sword of yours as well? You know, for an up-and-coming sorcerer, you show remarkably little breadth of response.”

Ringil let go the Ravensfriend, felt the pommel slip through his hands as the Kiriath-engineered scabbard sucked the handbreadth of exposed blade back into itself. He eyed the slumped form before him and held down the repeated urge to shiver.

“And you are?”

“And still he does not know me.”

Abruptly, the corpse loomed to its feet, out of the chair as if tugged there by puppet’s strings. Ringil found himself face-to-face with the worm’s head cowl and the blank darkness it framed. He made himself stare back, but if there was a face in there, dead or alive, he could not make it out. The whispering voice seemed to come from everywhere at once—down from the eaves of the thatch, up amid the crackle of the hearth, out of the air just behind his ear.

“You did not know me at Trelayne’s Eastern Gate, when your destiny was first laid out in terms you could understand. You did not know me at the river, when the first of the Cold gathered to you, and your passage to the Dark Gate began. And I sent a whole
shipload
of corpses for you when you were finally ready to come back. So tell me, Ringil Eskiath—how many times must I look out at you through the eyes of the dead before I am given my due?”

It fell in on him like the thatched roof coming down. The cloak and cowl, the stylized placement of hands, one raised to the arm of the chair, the other gathered in the lap, holding—

“Fifirdar?”

“Oh, well done.” The corpse turned and shuffled away from him, back toward the hearth. “Took you long enough, didn’t it? Wouldn’t have thought it’d be so hard to recognize the Queen of the Dark Court when she comes calling. We are your ancestral gods, are we not?”

“Not by my choice,” he said starkly.

But through his head it went, all the same—the call-and-response prayer to the Mistress of Dice and Death:

Firfirdar sits

Upon her molten iron throne

And is not touched

By fire

Is kernel heart of darkness to the blaze

It was ingrained—a decade of foot-dragging attendance at the Eskiath family temple, every week like clockwork until, finally, at fifteen years of age, he found the words to face his father down and refuse the charade.

By then, though, the cant was worked into his brain like tanner’s dung.

Firfirdar smiles

In shadows lit by liquid fire

And holds the dice

Of days

Holds dice for all, and all that is to come

Firfirdar lifts

The dice of days in one cold hand

And rolls them free

In fire

Calls luck like sparks from out the forge of fate

“Yes, well.” The corpse bent stiffly into the shadows beside the fire-glow and the pallid, long-nailed hand reached a poker from its resting place against the stonework. Firfirdar prodded at the fire, and a log fell loose, cascading embers. “Fortunately, we’re not all dependent on
your
choices in such matters.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Oh.” The poker stabbed into the hearth a couple more times. Sparks billowed up the chimney. The voice rustled about in the flicker-lit, haunted spaces of the croft. “You were passing. It seemed as good a time as any.”

“You know, for a goddess of death and destiny, you show remarkably little sense of divine grandeur.”

The corpse leaned over the hearth, cowl pressed to the low stone mantelpiece as if tired by its exertions. The echo of Ringil’s words seemed to hang in the silence. For a long, cold-sweat moment, he wondered if the dark queen would take offense.

His fingers flexed and formed a brief fist—

Look, I won’t lie to you, Gil. No
ikinri ‘ska
ward is going to actually back down a member of the Dark Court.
Hjel the Dispossessed, almost apologetic when Ringil asks him. It’s his magic, after all, his heritage he’s teaching.
But if you throw enough of them around, well
—a faint shrug—
you might buy yourself some time, I suppose.

Time to do what?

But to that, he gets no answer beyond the dispossessed prince’s customary slipshod grin. Hjel is not what you’d call a consistent guide.

What he is, exactly, Ringil has yet to work out.

—and so … 

He loosened the fist, forced his fingers to hang slack. Waited for the dark queen’s response.

“Funny.” The corpse had not moved, was still bent there over the hearth. It was as if Fifirdar was talking to the flames. “Yes. They did say that. That you think you’re
funny.
”

A thick silence poured into the croft behind the snap in that final word. All the hairs on Ringil’s forearms and the back of his neck leaped erect. He mastered the shudder, thrust it down, and stared at the hunched black form. The
ikinri ‘ska,
swirling like water just below his fingertips … 

The corpse straightened up. Set the poker aside in the shadows by the wall.

“We’re wasting time,” said Firfirdar sibilantly. “I am not your enemy. You would not still be standing there if I were.”

“Perhaps not.” Behind the mask he kept, a cool relief went pummeling through his veins. He let the
ikinri ‘ska
subside. “But please don’t claim the Dark Court has my best interests at heart, either. I’ve read a few too many hero legends to believe that.”

“Legends are written down by mortals, floundering in the details of their world, seeking significance for their acts where usually there is none.” The corpse hobbled back to its seat by the fire. “You would do well not to set too much store by such tales.”

“Is it inaccurate, then, my lady, to say that heroes in the service of the gods rarely end well?”

“Men who carry steel upon their backs and live by it rarely end well. It would be a little unjust to blame the gods for that, don’t you think?”

Ringil grimaced. “The Mistress of Dice and Death complains to me of injustice? Have you not being paying attention, my lady? Injustice is the fashion—for the last several thousand years, as near as I can determine, and more than likely before that, too. I think it unlikely the Dark Court has not had a hand in any of it.”

“Well, our attention has been known to wander.” It was hard to be sure with that whispering, rustling voice, but the dark queen seemed amused. “But we are focused on you now, which is what counts. Rejoice, Ringil Eskiath—we are here to help.”

“Really? The lady Kwelgrish gave me to understand that mortal affairs are a game you play at. It’s hard to rejoice in being treated as a piece on the board.”

Quiet. The corpse lolled back in the rocking chair’s embrace. The nails of its left hand tapped at the wooden armrest, like the click of dice in a cupped palm.

“Kwelgrish is … forthright, by the standards of the Court.”

“You mean she shouldn’t have told me?”

The soft crackle of the fire in the hearth. Gil thought, uneasily, that the leaping shadows painted on the wall behind Firfirdar were a little too high and animated to fit the modest flames in the hearth that supposedly threw them. A little too
shaped
as well, a little too suggestive of upward tilted jaws and teeth, as if some invisible, inaudible dog pack surged and clamored there in the gloom behind the dark queen’s chair, only waiting to be unleashed … 

Very slowly, the corpse lifted both hands to the edges of the cowl it wore. Lifted the dark cloth back and up, away from the visage it covered.

The breath stopped in Ringil’s throat.

With an effort of will, he looked back into Firfirdar’s eyes.

It was not that the corpse she had chosen was hideous with decay—far from it. Apart from a telltale pallor and a sunken look around the eyes, it was a face that might still have belonged with the living.

But it was beautiful.

It was the face of some fine-featured, consumptive youth you’d readily kiss and risk infection for. A face you might lose yourself in one haunted back-alley night, then wake without the next day and spend fruitless months searching the stew of streets for again. It was a face that gathered you in, that beckoned you away, that rendered all thought of safety and common sense futile. A face you’d go to gladly, when the time came; no regrets and nothing left behind but a faint and fading smile, printed on your cooling lips.

“Do you see me, Ringil Eskiath?”
asked the hissing, whispering voice.

It was like flandrijn fumes through his head, like stumbling on a step that suddenly wasn’t there. He reeled and swayed from the force of it, and the corpse’s mouth did not move at all and the voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.

“Do you see me now?”

Out of the seething, chilling confusion of his own consciousness, Ringil mustered the will to stay on his feet. He drew in breath, hard.

“Yes,” he said. “I see you.”

“Then let us understand each other. It isn’t easy being a god, but some of us are better at it than others. Kwelgrish has her intricate games and her irony, Dakovash his constant rage and disappointment with mortals, and Hoiran just likes to watch. But I am none of these. You would be ill-advised to judge me as if I were. Is that clear?”

Ringil swallowed, dry-throated. Nodded.

“That’s good.”
The corpse raised pallid hands once more and lifted the cowl back in place. Something went out of the space around them, as if someone had opened a window somewhere to let in fresh air. “Now—to the business at hand. Walk with me, Ringil Eskiath. Convince me that my fellow gods have not been overly optimistic in their assessment of your worth.”

“Walk with you whe—”

The fire billowed upward in the hearth, blinded him where he stood. Soundless detonation that deafens his gaze. The croft walls and thatch ripped back, no more substantial than a Majak yurt torn away by cyclone winds. He thought he caught a glimpse of them borne away at some angle it hurts his eyes to look at. Gone, all gone. He blinked—shakes his head—is standing suddenly before a roaring bonfire, on a deserted beach, under an eerily luminescent sky.

Walk with me here,
says Firfirdar quietly.

She’s unhooded again, it’s the same achingly beautiful dying youth’s face, but here it seems not to have the power it had back in the croft. Or maybe it’s him—maybe he has a power here the real world will not permit him. Either way there’s no punch-to-the-guts menace, no fracturing of his will and sense of self. Instead, he thinks, the Mistress of Dice and Death looks overwhelmingly saddened by something, and maybe a little lost.

There is not much time,
she murmurs.
The dwenda have found a way back—though
back
is a relative term, as they’ll discover soon enough—and with them comes every dark thing men have ever feared.

Ringil shivers. There’s a hard wind coming off the sea, stoking the bonfire, whipping up the flames and leaching the heat away.